Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. A former aide to Margaret Thatcher, Gardiner has served as a foreign policy adviser to two US presidential campaigns. He appears frequently on American and British television, including Fox News Channel, BBC, and Fox Business Network.

Barack Obama is poisoning the Special Relationship

If further proof were needed that the Obama administration’s relentless bashing of BP is seriously damaging America’s standing in Britain, a new YouGov poll shows that just 54 percent of Britons now have a favourable view of the United States, down from 64 percent before the Gulf oil spill. The poll, which surveyed 1,500 people on both sides of the Atlantic, also revealed that a significant majority of Britons believe that Barack Obama has harmed the Special Relationship. As The Sunday Times reports, “by 64% to 2% in Britain and by 47% to 5% in America, people believe the president’s handling of the crisis has damaged relations.” In addition, 22 percent of those surveyed in both the US and UK believe that President Obama is anti-British, a strikingly high figure among Americans.

“45% of British respondents in June believe that the relationship between Britain and America has got worse since Obama took office in November 2008 – a dramatic increase from the 25% who responded this way when asked the same question a month ago.”

When Obama was campaigning for president (as did John Kerry before him), he harped on endlessly about “restoring” America’s standing in the world in the wake of the War on Terror and the Anglo-American led war in Iraq, as though world leadership were some sort of glib PR exercise. He excoriated the Bush administration for supposedly alienating US allies (no doubt he had the likes of France and Germany in mind), and imperiously lectured about the need to make America respected abroad.

But what has the Obama administration actually succeeded in doing? Seriously damaging relations with its closest ally, Great Britain, throwing loyal allies like Poland and the Czech Republic to the Russian bear, and sparking a major diplomatic spat with America’s closest friend in the Middle East, Israel. I don’t recall President Bush ever knifing US partners in the back, and siding for example with Washington's enemies in Latin America by calling for negotiations over the sovereignty of British territory. Bush understood the meaning of alliances, and he also cherished the partnership with Great Britain. No one could ever accuse him of being anti-British.

President Obama has succeeded in significantly harming America’s standing in many parts of the world. It may not be a major electoral issue in the November mid-terms, which will be overwhelmingly focused on the economy, jobs and healthcare, but it could well haunt him in the 2012 presidential election, when the issue of US leadership will be a far bigger issue. Obama’s foreign policy has not only been arrogant, weak and ineffective – it has also been a public relations disaster in countries that have traditionally stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States. Obama’s biggest achievement on the world stage has been to embolden America’s enemies, while spectacularly alienating its allies – not even Jimmy Carter achieved that.